VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing my entire presentation from the recent Barbados SEO conference.
I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the second annual Barbados SEO conference a few weeks ago. Thanks to my friend Martin MscDonald for that invite. This was an absolutely stellar conference, and that’s not just because I had a view like this, out of the window of my room at the hotel. It was a ridiculously stacked lineup of expert speakers, and almost all of them were good friends. So it was a really fun conference. Plus, come on. We were in Barbados, so it was paradise.
Side note, they’re selling super early bird tickets to next year’s Barbados SEO. There are only a hundred tickets available for the event. So if you’re interested, you should lock your spot in soon. Head over to Barbados SEO dot com and get registered. But anyway, at the conference, I rocked a presentation about local SEO, and I wanted to share it here in this week’s episode. Obviously, this will be a bit longer. So kick back and get ready for the fire hose.
This is Batman’s definitive guide to local SEO. I’m Greg. I’m the COO at SearchLab. You probably know that already, but just in case you’re watching for the first time, I have a weekly video series that you’re watching right now, search Tuesdays, you can catch it every week on our blog or on any of our social accounts.
I’m also lucky enough to get to speak at conferences all over the world like this one that I just did in Barbados. And because of that sometimes, you see, some presentations that aren’t really that engaging. Typically, it’s some sales guy up on stage just trying to pitch whatever it is that he’s selling, and there’s a plain white background to every slide, and they didn’t do any graphics. So there’s no colors.
It’s just white background, black text, they use aerial font, and they pack every slide with bullet points and just read bullet points for the entire presentation.
And not only is that kind of painful to watch, it’s a scientifically proven fact that bullet points kill the kittens. So let’s keep all the kitties safe. We’re not gonna have any Kittens die from today’s presentation.
And for those of you that don’t know, I love love love movies. And there is always a movie theme to presentations that I do today is superhero movies. We have a hundred and three superhero movies referenced in the present including at least one for every year in the last fifty years. And we have every Batman movie and all of the Marvel movies in timeline order.
So it’s super nerdy for all you comic book fans. If it’s something obscure you haven’t seen, there is attribution to the site. So not only will you learn some awesome stuff about local SEO, You’ll have a kick ass list of movies to watch later. So let’s get this going.
Why the long face? Are you spending too much time looking up at the competition ranking higher in searches? Know SEO is really confusing, but you don’t have to have a huge brain to succeed even though it might seem like it’s a lot of magic and voodoo. It’s really not.
I’m here with a lot of hot tips today.
I hope you’re laughing at that to help you crush the competition and kick ass in search results. It’s important to understand that there are multiple algorithms that Google uses to display search results. And the local algorithm weights factors differently. So you have to do SEO differently, especially because it includes additional signals that the traditional algorithm doesn’t use, which means you need to use different strategies when you’re optimizing So let’s start off by figuring out if you need to do local or not. The easiest way to know is that you do face to face businesses with customers. Either at a brick and mortar physical storefront or as a service business like a plumber or an electrician, then you need to do local SEO.
Or sometimes e commerce has local intent as well. So even if you’re purely e commerce or purely online, search for a handful of your most important keywords. And if you see a map pack displayed, that means Google says that query often has local intent, and you’ll need to learn local and use those strategies on your site as well. The best thing to do is to pay attention to the annual local search ranking factor study that’s run by WhiteSpark.
Every year, they interview the top forty ish experts in local SEO aggregate all of the answers to get a pretty good idea of which factors influence local visibility. And you get two pie charts every year. The first shows you the factors that influence your visibility in the local pack and in Google Maps. And the second shows you the factors that influence your visibility in the localized organic results below the map pack. And the LacerF is basically your SEO Bible. It’s your guide for what you need to do each year if you wanna achieve better visibility in search results. And I like to boil things down to simple concepts because a lot of times at conferences you get overwhelmed.
And a lot of times too, the people that hear me speak at a conference have to then go back to their boss and suggest changes and strategy. So the simple concept ideas help drive those points across. And the way that I like to illustrate how local SEO works is with pizza delivery.
And the example works like this. If you’re sitting in your office and you type just two words into Google, pizza delivery. You get a list of all the pizza spots that are right there by your office. Then you could do the same search at home with the same two words and get totally different search results.
And that’s because your location influences what you’re going to see as a search result, even if you don’t specify a city or use a phrase, like near me or nearby, that’s how the local algorithm works.
But it’s important to understand that we’re not just putting keywords in certain places. It’s also about optimizing the user experience on the website and optimizing to get better conversions out of the traffic that you’re getting. Because we know that in most cases, people are gonna shop around, especially as you skew towards the more expensive end of the products or services that you sell, people are gonna do some research and look at your competition before they convert and submit their information or before they buy, which means you need to be standing out from the competition, not just by ranking better, but by having a better user experience.
You wanna be memorable. You wanna be appealing. You wanna give people a reason to come back and convert later when they’re done with their research and they’re ready to buy. Because if you’ve got the same generic b s content that everyone else in town has on their site, why is anyone gonna care?
Why is anyone gonna choose to buy from you? So use your content to show everyone why you’re stinking awesome. Why you should be the only solution for their problem. And make sure that your content is actually truly about your business, not the same generic BS as everyone else, but about what makes you unique and it also needs to be clear that you’re a part of the local community.
And there’s an easy way to test that. Take your homepage content or your about us page content.
And change only two things. Every time your business name appears you would change it to something else. And every time the city that you’re in and just that one city appears you change it to something else. Could you then take that homepage content and put it on a similar business’s website on the other side of the country?
Would the content still work? Because if it would, that means it’s not really about you or your local area. And there’s another really important content test that I always suggest, and that’s reading your content out loud.
Everything on your site should be conversational content. It should sound like something that you would say face to face to a potential customer.
But if you just read it in your head, then your marketing brain sees keywords and you think keyword, keyword, keyword. Oh my gosh. This is gonna rank. But when you physically read it out loud, you catch those things that don’t sound conversational.
So try this one. It’s a really good trick. That helps you catch those things that don’t really sound conversational on your website. Another really simple and probably the most important simple concept to remember when it comes to SEO.
If you wanna show up as a search result when somebody types in a particular search phrase, then you need a dedicated page on your website out that singular concept. And that page needs to be the best answer in the local area to the question that that potential customer is asking. And if you’re writing the best answer, That probably means you’re answering some of the subsequent questions that that person would have once they got their initial answer. That’s how you write really good content.
And then you need to optimize your pages differently when you’re targeting the local algorithm because the local algorithm weights things differently and looks at different signal. So I’m gonna walk you through how to optimize the various page elements so you can either optimize better yourself or check the work that your vendor partner is doing. So most importantly, you need to have the same keyword in the same city in each of these and it should only be a singular keyword in singular city. You don’t wanna list, like, five cities in each of these because that’s not gonna help you rank.
So the title tag is the most weighted, most important element. It’s what shows in the little tab above where you type in the URL, you should never put your business name first, especially now that Google displays the name of the business above the blue link when it shows a search result, so you don’t need it for branding even. So you wanna have your important keyword phrase in your city, in your title tag. The next most important element on the page is the h one heading new only have one h one heading.
It should be the big thick headline above the main body of text on your page. It should be a little bit more conversational. But have the same keyword and the same city. And, obviously, you need it in your page content as well, but if you’ve written the best answer in the local area that answers subsequent questions, that’s all about your business and all about the local area, you’re probably not gonna have to do much to update your content.
It’s probably already gonna be done for you.
Alt text on images is another important one years ago. Google couldn’t tell what was in an image. So alt text was part of the algorithm. It’s part of the image embed code that describes the image.
And it’s something that a lot of marketers still don’t do anything with, and a lot of business owners don’t do anything with it. And even though Google can use machine learning to tell its own images now, alt text is still a small signal to the algorithm. So you should optimize that alt text plus If you’re in the United States, it’s an accessibility issue because ADA compliance laws say that all websites with embedded images have to have all text so that anyone that has a visual impairment using a screen reading browser, that browser will still be able to describe what’s on the page. So
besides the SEO implications, nobody wants to get sued. So make sure you do that alt text. It’s also helpful to have the keyword phrase and city in the URL. Now I’m not suggesting changing a URL for a page that’s already been indexed because that won’t be effective.
But as you create new content moving forward, include that information in the URL string, also put it in the meta description. Now the meta description doesn’t influence ranking, but because it does populate those couple of gray sentences, underneath your blue link, when you show as a search result, it’s important to write something compelling and including that keyword phrase in Citi will help you get more click throughs. You also need to have a blog. A lot of people think blogs are just fluff and that they don’t do anything and that they’re not effective, but that’s actually very, very wrong.
You’ve gotta have a blog if you wanna do solid SEO work and you need to post on a regular basis because there’s a huge difference between the kind of content that goes on the main of your site and the kind of content that goes on your blog. Main website content is sales focused content. It’s revenue generating content. It’s bottom of the funnel content that’s meant to show up and drive conversions.
Blog content is mid to upper funnel targeted, which means you shouldn’t really expect to get leads from your blog posts, but That blog content is informational. It’s discovery focused. It’s there to attract people earlier in the buying cycle because the or you get eyeballs on your site, the more likely it is that you’ll be the one that gets that customer.
In fact, if you make your blog a local destination and periodically share how full, useful, interesting information about the local area, even if it has nothing to do with your business, that helps get more eyeballs on your site. We call that pre funnel con it. It’s like putting up a billboard.
You show up in search results to people that aren’t even looking to buy what you’re selling, but everybody’s gonna need to buy what you’re selling at some point. So it helps get you noticed earlier on. If you need ideas for how to do this, I’ve got an awesome video here from my series that walks you through the ten main concepts that you can use as springboards to write your own localized content. And everybody always wants to show up in multiple cities nearby, but local SEO is very much based on your physical location and your proximity to the person doing the search.
So before you try to show up and optimize for other nearby cities, you need to make sure that you own your backyard. And what I mean by that is that you need to have solid enough SEO that you are dominating the search results for the city where you’re actually located. Because if you start trying to show up in nearby cities, you don’t have a physical location there, which means not only do you have to out optimize the competition there. You’re at a huge deficit because that location doesn’t exist for you because you don’t have a location in that city.
I’m not saying it’s not possible. It’s just gonna be very difficult if you don’t even have good enough SEO to show up in the city where you’re actually located. So own your backyard first. But then if you wanna expand, if you’re in a less competitive area, you can just create some city pages and do pretty well with this.
So watch the video. It walks you through how to do it, but if there’s a lot more competition or it’s just a dense metro area, you’re probably gonna need to go more advanced than city pages and create entire local content silos. This video will walk you through it. This is a much longer term play than city pages.
It takes a long time to work, although it does work. So you should do this in conjunction with whatever else you’re doing. It shouldn’t be your sole focus. And links are evaluated differently by the local algorithm as well.
We don’t even care about domain authority. It’s a complete BS metric invented by years ago anyway, but it especially does not have any influence in local. We don’t care if it’s a no follow link that no follow attribute In traditional SEO is kind of a killer for link building. You don’t wanna get no follow links because value doesn’t get passed to the traditional algorithm, but In local, it’s been proven time and time again that no follow links are still effective.
So we just don’t really care. All you really need to worry about is getting links from local businesses and local websites. And if you get involved in the local community, it’s really exceedingly easy to do that.
But sometimes businesses aren’t that involved in the local community. So I’m gonna run you through some ideas of things that you can do for local league building. Local sponsorships are great. You can’t buy links, but you can buy sponsorships that result in links.
So five ks, golf tournaments, Little League, Pewee football, Pewee hockey. All of these are great opportunities to get local links. Local meetups are great as well. You can go to meetup dot com or Facebook groups, and find groups that are meeting on a regular basis in your local area.
Look for groups looking for meeting sponsors, throw in fifty, sixty bucks a month to buy their snacks and their soft drinks, as long as they give you a local link. Guess what? You can get some awesome links that way. Find all of the locally based bloggers get them to write about you even if their vertical doesn’t match.
Maybe it’s a travel blogger and you’re trying to ask them to write about your plastic surgery practice. Doesn’t matter. Even if you give them a free product or service to write that post, maybe you’re a car dealer and you give somebody an oil change for free if they’ll write on their blog about their experience at your service lane. Who cares that the top of the blog post says I got a free oil change to write this post.
They’re still gonna link to you, and that link’s still gonna be valuable. Talk to your team, talk to your staff about what they’re passionate about. And what they spend time doing outside of work. What are their hobbies?
Because if they’re a member of a local club or organization, especially if they’re on the leadership group of clever organization. It’s gonna be exceedingly easy to get a link back to your website. You can also use Google to do the work for you. Come up with your own list of keywords that conceptualize the things you’d like to go after and add your city name to those keywords, and Google’s gonna spit out a huge list of opportunities where you can go get some links.
I’m also sharing our onboarding questionnaire with you. We give this to all of our new clients. It helps uncover low hanging fruit of things that have already happened in the recent past that are link opportunities. It also helps prioritize what you would do for late building strategies moving forward.
And reviews are really important, which is kinda shocking because most seo agencies don’t offer reputation management as part of their SEO service, but reviews are a very weighted element in local algorithm, so it should always be a part of your SEO strategy. In fact, reviews have gained more weight every year for the past several years in that local algorithm. Google is giving them more and more weight and emphasis. But I’m not talking about that testimonials page on your site.
That’s a worthless page. Customers wanna read honest unbiased reviews on third party sites so they’re not gonna look at your testimonials page, which means you have to have a proactive review process It’s not human nature to leave a review when you’re happy. If you’re mad, sure. You’re gonna leave a bad review, but if you’re happy, you’re not really gonna leave that review unless someone asks you to leave the review.
But, hey, then you’d be happy to leave that review. So you wanna make it easy to leave a review so that it the people that don’t really know where to go can quickly find the right place to go and ask every single customer, and make sure you answer every review Doesn’t really matter for ranking, but it matters for conversions. People wanna see that you care about what reviews you have been left. And if someone takes the time to write a good review, doesn’t take that much time to leave them a quick thank you.
And, obviously, your bad reviews need to be responded to as well. Because potential customers wanna know that you care about giving great customer service. But remember when you’re responding to those bad reviews, that response isn’t for the person that left the review, you should be dealing with them offline and trying to rectify the situation. Your response to a bad review online is to explain to future customers how you handle the situation because future customers are gonna read those bad reviews.
And the algorithm doesn’t care how many reviews you have. You just need to be sure that you’ve got more than the local competition, which means as you acquire new reviews, you need to be slightly faster in your acquisition space than what your competition is acquiring. And some new research that’s come to light this year gives us a really cool opportunity to do something awesome. So talking about that default sort of the top ten reviews that show when you first go to your business profile before you switch the sort, to see the newest reviews or the worst reviews or the best reviews, if a review includes a photo, it stays in that default sort for a longer period of time.
If the review has more text content, if it’s a longer review, it stays in the default sort for a longer period of time. And if a review has two or more thumbs up, it will stay in that default sort for a longer period of time. So if we put all those together, you could do something awesome. If you get a bad review that shows in the default sort, That’s extremely bad because it’s an immediate bad first impression, but you can get that review buried quickly by doing all three.
Reach out to someone who recently left you a good review. Ask them to add a photo and a little bit more of a story to their review. And then once they’ve done, so have several people on your team go through and give that review a thumbs up and it pops right to the top of the list. Do that several times, and you’ll bury that bad review.
Let’s finish up talking about your Google business profile because it’s literally the new homepage of your website. It is the first impression that potential customers will have of your business. And a properly optimized business profile allows you to show up better in map pack search results. So make sure you fill out every field except for the areas served field That doesn’t really do anything unless you’re a service business. And in that case, it doesn’t even affect ranking. It just draws an outline around your area of service. Make sure that you put UTM tracking on your website links because Google Analytics attribution is broken and you wanna be sure that you have the right data in Google Analytics to make better decisions.
Most of the mobile traffic doesn’t pass referral data to Google Analytics, which means a lot of the mobile organic visits that you get are classified name analytics as direct traffic instead of organic. So watch this video. It explains how to set up the right kind of UTM tracking on your website links And make sure that the landing page of your Google business profile, which is typically your home page, but if it’s a multi location business, you’d be linking to the individual location page for that location. So whatever your landing page is, make sure it’s optimized for your most important money keyword phrase and the city that you’re in.
Make sure you’ve listed your correct hours of operations, which seems a little boneheaded, but you’d be surprised how many people set and forget. And you wanna make sure your hours are correct. You wanna make sure you’re uploading professionally shot high quality photos. You wanna make sure you’re selecting the correct categories.
This has a ton of influence in the searches that you’ll show up for. In fact, you wanna be very strategic with which category you select as your primary category because it’s more weighted in fact. According to this year’s local search ranking factor study, this is the most influential factor that influences your visibility.
Influential that influences. Sorry. My brain’s not working. But you know what I mean? This is the most influential factor for map pack visibility. So be strategic. Watch this video.
Now if you have problems with your business profile, they’re very support happy later or or lately. So you wanna make sure if you’re having problems, usually it’s not helpful to go to support. They’re not gonna be that helpful. Instead, Go to the Google business profile community forum.
It’s staffed by volunteers, but those volunteers, eventually get invited into product expert program, which means they’ve been endorsed by Google and they know their stuff and those product experts can really help you with the problems at a much better level than Google support. And if they are gold, platinum, or diamond level product experts, they have the ability to escalate that forum post directly to the Google business profile team. So it’s a much easier way to get support if you’re having any problems You wanna make sure you’re using Google Post. Now Google posts are basically free ads that appear in your Google business profile.
So you should treat them like ads. It’s not social media. So watch this video. It’s a whiteboard Friday episode that I did for MOS, and it is packed densely with a bunch of tips on how to be successful with Google posts.
But the most important element is thinking about what shows in the post thumbnail. Google automatically crops to a smaller version of your image. And you can’t control the crop, and it only shows the first few words of text if that thumbnail image and text are not compelling.
Nobody’s gonna click through on your post and it won’t be successful.
But image cropping is super wonky because you can’t control it and it’s not consistent. So I’ve created a Photoshop template that you can use for better control over what’s gonna show in that thumbnail image. You can download it at the link right there, and it looks like this. Anything in that white grid will be safe.
It will show in the thumbnail, and then the rest of the image will appear when they click and see the full posts. Make sure you don’t use stock images. If you use real, you know, images that you shot yourself, not stock images, A lot of research has been done to show that you’ll get a lot more click throughs to your posts. You also wanna pay attention to the questions and answers widget in your Google business profile because anyone can ask you a question there, but any random a hole can answer that question for you.
The general public thinks it’s a chat widget and that you’re sitting the other end waiting to answer their questions, but it’s really a community discussion widget. So questions can receive multiple answers from different people. But you can give thumbs up to answers in whichever answer has the most thumbs up is the answer that’s displayed as the primary answer to the question. You need to make sure that your owner answers are always uploaded to be the primary answers to questions.
You can even load your own questions in in people think this is against the rules, but it was actually encouraged by Google in the release blog post years ago. We call it a pre site FAQ because no one is going to go to your website and read through your frequently asked questions to see if their question is there and maybe answered.
And they’re actually not gonna do it here either, but it’s really cool the way that this works. If they click the ask a question button and they go in and start to type a question any similar question has been asked and answered in the past, then Google will automatically display an answer as they’re typing their question in. So it’s actually faster than chat or even faster than an AI chatbot. So it’s an amazing pre site experience that will get you more conversions.
And we also have a local SEO scoring matrix that we use at conferences and on demo calls with potential partners And it’s basically a mini audit that looks at the four areas that influence visibility and local searches, which are the content on your site and how it’s optimized. The link’s pointed at your site from other sites, your Google business profile and how it’s optimized and your reviews on Google and Yelp and how you respond to those reviews. Important to point out that this matrix scores on tactics, not on strategy. Now most people use those terms interchangeably, but strategy is which direction are you going, and tactics are which steps do you take to get there.
The reason that we score on basic tactics is to make it more helpful. We want this to be universally helpful for the people that we use it on. And if it was more like a Hubspot site greater or an SEMR site greater, it’d be very easy to refute those results. You could say, “oh, they don’t know your business. That’s a different strategy. Ours is better.”
But we’re not looking at strategy. We’re looking at the basic SEO tactics that anyone that knows SEO would agree are important to be handled. And if you’re not using the right basic tactics, it really doesn’t matter what your strategy is.
And this was a huge game changer for us. We more than doubled the close rate on our demo calls when we started using this for every demo call because we’re talking about actual things that we can fix as opposed to just giving the same default generic presentation to everyone. The four areas in the matrix are weighted to then approximate the importance of each of those areas to the algorithm. And then when you add the scores up, you get a score anywhere from zero to a hundred.
Although some things can give you negative points if you do them incorrectly, the highest score that we’ve ever seen is an eighty three point six. Effectively, it’s in possible to get a perfect score. But if you’re doing pretty solid SEO, you should be somewhere in the low sixties to mid eighties. But this was a client site.
So the highest non client score we’ve seen was only a sixty five. The lowest score that we’ve ever seen was a negative seventy one.
But the average score is only eighteen points out of a possible hundred. So if you’d like to check it out and see if it’s something you could use for your own clients, I’ve included two different links here. The generic version works for any locally oriented business. And then we have versions that are specific to verticals so that we can hone in on things that are unique for those particular types of websites.
So I also included a link to the automotive version of this so that you can see how we adjusted scores and what we looked at differently there. You can take these, use them for yourself for your own clients. You are welcome to grab them from those links. It’s a really great way to point out obvious opportunities where local SEO can help, but it’s also a great guide for your team if you get those clients.
For what you should do initially to optimize their signals so that it’ll show up better in searches. So thanks so much for sitting through that fire hose of a presentation. Hopefully, now you won’t be down and depressed when you’re thinking about your visibility in searches because you got all those hot tips for me. And know that’s not the same joke because this is ghostwriter too.
You’ll no longer be the underdog in search results, and everyone will be super happy. That was Batman’s tactical guide, just superhero level SEO.
Or definitive guide or whatever I called it. I don’t even remember. And it’s been too many conferences this year. This was my twenty fifth conference.
It’s crazy, but there’s my email address. If you have any questions, give me a shout. I’m happy to answer them. If you’d like a copy of the slides, I’m happy to share those with you as well.
Because at the end, as always, there’s a list of all the movies by order of release date.
Thanks so much for sticking around to watch the whole thing. That’s definitely all the time we’ve got left for this week’s episode. So you know what that means, put your hand on the screen right here. We totally just tie five because you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
